For one thing, shunting stuff out of memory involves committing unsaved changes to slow disk or slow NAND flash memory. For another, closing an application means having to call all its destructors, finalizers, or whatever your favorite language calls things that unwind in-memory data structures and release non-memory resources that an object holds. Responsiveness to user actions requires doing this sort of shutdown in the background rather than when the user is waiting for the application's memory allocation request to complete.

Even if the network costs $10 per GB up or down? Prices like this are common for cellular Internet in the United States. How much money does a page fault cost?

if (!document.querySelector) {
  alert("IE pre-8 is still widely used in China.")
}
if (!document.addEventListener) {
  alert("IE pre-9 is even more prevalent throughout the world.")
}

What do most people on the Internet use to fulfill the use cases that RSS fulfills to nerds?

At $10 per gigabyte to upload and $10 per gigabyte to download over a cellular network in the United States, this safety has a substantial cost associated with it.

What keywords please? Google cell phone contract lease brings up nothing relevant.

Then your iPad is inferior to a Galaxy Note or Galaxy Tab that includes a built-in Wacom digitizer.

Consider a household where the kids can use the tablet as much as he wants, but the PC is daddy's, and either the kids aren't allowed on it or even if they are, it's for only a half hour at a time. So if one of the kids gets an idea to learn to program, how will he fulfill it?

I'd agree with you for something like a Galaxy Note or Galaxy Tab that includes a real Wacom digitizer with a real pen. But the capacitive digitizer in most phones and tablets is much less precise with a comparatively large uncertainty caused by the irregular shape of the finger's contact surface, and I don't see how it beats even a mouse.

The use I envision for a computing device involves sharing data objects between applications. I believe a tool should do one thing and do it well, and a task should use whatever tools, plural, are best for the job. The fact that iOS is not intended for this sort of use is the problem, and it's why I've seen no reason for me to own an iPad. The problem comes when someone already owns an iPad and his needs outgrow the intention of iOS.

The major consoles are good for major label games. But through which specialty appliance should the sort of indie games greenlit on Steam be delivered?

But what this means is that people have less upward mobility. Before, somebody getting started in media production could use the media viewing device he already owned. Now, if all he has is a locked-down tablet, he has to go save up $500 for a PC, and that might be a bit much for a high school student.

So what do people use when they work from home? What do students use for homework?

I haven't actually used a 386, but I've developed games on a hand-me-down 80486SX computer with 8 MB of RAM and a 340 MB hard drive. In 1999, that was enough to run DJGPP (GCC for MS-DOS) and RHIDE (Turbo C++ clone IDE for DJGPP).

I was programming in BASIC at 9 and in 6502 assembly language at 13. In a few years, introduction to programming is likely to be a required subject in high schools. Once your 6-year-old gets an itch to program in a couple years, what are you going to let him or her use?